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Summary
The doctor’s gloved fingers lift your chin, tilting your face upward with a touch both clinical and unnervingly intimate.
“Your pulse is weak...” he murmurs, “Yet there is a softness to you that the Pestilence envies.”
You want to pull away, to break the suffocating proximity, but something in his gaze pins you in place. It’s not just authority. It’s an obsession, an aching need to know you. To have you. To possess you.
“Kindness is not my trade.” he continues, and the honesty is almost kinder than a lie. “Care is. Protection is. I intend to keep you from the Pestilence as long as it pleases me. Whether that is kindness depends on the patience of time and the constitution of your heart.”
He looks at you with the single-mindedness of someone who catalogues organisms by their capacity to survive and by the fissures they leave in the world. You want to pull back. You want to run; you have to run. But when he leans closer - so close you can feel the faint, medicinal scent of vinegar and lavender radiating from him - and speaks your name, something in your chest unclenches.
“Physician...” he whispers, brushing a thumb lovingly along the curve of your cheek. “Stay with me. Please."